Good Talk celebrates a year of structuring spaces to build community
The Good Talk Collective is set to celebrate a year of small events that explore what it means to be a leader and work to heal loneliness, disconnection, and division.
Good Talk is "basically a place for anybody who's just looking to be in community with other folks also grappling with big questions about how they show up in the world," co-founder Lindsay Humber told Taproot.
The group's anniversary event runs June 7 at YWCA Edmonton Cushing House. Like all Good Talk events, it will raise money for the CHEW Project (serving vulnerable or homeless 2SLGBTQ+ youth), and will centre on a theme applied to leadership at home, in the community, or at work.
Shannon Price, Good Talk's other co-founder, said the idea is that being a leader doesn't only apply to business CEOs, presidents, or executive directors, but for many who work at home or in their communities. "I have a dissertation on this," Price said with a laugh. "When I think about leadership, it's doing the things that I need to do to show up the best that I can."
Price is an associate with Tilia Consulting, a firm that specializes in engagement, facilitation, and strategic communications, and also works at NAIT. Humber, Good Talk's other half (and owner of Tilia Consulting), said the group is its "own thing" but uses the Tilia infrastructure to "keep it out in the world."
The two formed Good Talk to exchange perspectives with others looking for connection. Part of the idea was to form a book club where no one had to read a specific book, and another was to fill a gap in connection they'd witnessed through their work at Tilia.
"It's an occupational hazard of our jobs — we're always asking folks around us about what's going on in their lives, about their thoughts, their experiences," Humber said. "One of the things that kept coming up, for me at least, was that folks around me were looking for structured spaces for community."
The June 7 event's theme is celebration, but Price and Humber said it's also about tracing threads through previous events' themes of joy, curiosity, creativity, courage, and change. Newcomers will learn what the collective is all about while returning attendees can draw connections between discussions thus far. Price and Humber also said Good Talk is a judgment-free zone. They want people to engage without fear or embarrassment.
"One of the things that Lindsay and I bonded over is that we don't like mayonnaise," said Price. It sounds odd at first, but Price said such banality can also create ease and form connections. The mayonnaise discussion "immediately elicits a response from people," she said. "People are either slathering that stuff all over everything or they hate it."
